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about Asia Buzz
Asia Buzz: Google
There is no other search engine worth using
By ERIC ELLIS
January 9, 2001
Web posted at 11:00 a.m. Hong Kong time, 10:00 p.m. EDT
It's just as well the moneymen got hold of Yahoo! early on and turned it into the virtual Internet default, and made then squillions. Because if Google.com had been around as long as Yahoo!, it wouldn't be Jerry Yang's face adorning the cover of magazines like TIME to become Nerdistan's leitmotiv. It'd be Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Who? They're the nerds behind Google, which is generating huge buzz as the search engine de rigueur. I've been using Google for about six months now and swear by it. For me, it's a bit like Napster. I've tried bamboozling Napster with searches for obscure tracks that I know are out there but may have possibly evaded Napster's reach. It's a little test to show how pervasive and effective the software and its users have become. Thus far Napster has about a 98% success rate. Google's hit rate may well be higher for me. My measure is that if I can't find what I want within three variational searches, then the engine is lame and I move on. Yahoo! doesn't measure up. But Google has. Every time.
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Google's kind of like comfort food. It's no frills, and you know you'll be satisfied after having some of it. It is simply an extraordinarily competent search engine that aims to find you precisely what you want. And not much more. It doesn't throw up pesky porn sites, nor does it offer the site that some company has paid Yahoo! big bucks to be No. 1, or have Yahoo's complex collection of categories to navigate through.
Tap the word money into Google and see what comes up. Naturally enough it's Money.com. That's kind of how it should be. Google is so reliable, so on-the-money that I have abandoned all other search facilities in homage to it. In a Google-like world, Alta Vista, Lycos and, yes, even Yahoo don't have a future -- and don't even bother with 'Ask Jeeves' and its variations.
Google's odd name is not so odd if you are a math grad. A "googol" is the massive number 1 followed by 100 zeros, as in a billion billion billion billion, and then some. Google's racking up some gooooooooogol-like numbers, indexing more than one billion Web pages. It's been around for about two years, but only really in users' faces for the past year. You can tell it's a hot product because it's one of the few techie things people still discuss at dinner parties. Google's spread across the Net has been largely word of mouth. Its growth has been kind of classic Silicon Valley. Two Stanford nerds, Page and Brin, threw it up in a garage (sound familiar Jerry Yang?), maxed out their credit cards and then hunted around for venture capital -- snaring $25 million BEFORE the tech wreck.
All of which is great, except for one crucial thing: that mantra-like question that dogs the Net. How's Google going to make money? It may be a great search engine that blows its competitors out of the water, but it's free. And advertisements on the site aren't exactly evident (not that the online ad market is booming).
How it makes money is that it gets sold. And the buyer will probably be Yahoo!, which has employed it, or rather rented its technology to power its own search facility. You don't know that when you are searching with Yahoo! as all of its cumbersome (albeit revenue-generating) categories come up. The chances are, though, that those categories' components have been located by Google technology.
So if it's just a straight, ultra-comprehensive search you want, forget Yahoo! and go straight to Google. You won't go back. Until something better comes along, that is.
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